Electronic mail (e-mail) provides a store and forward approach for end-to-end message delivery that allows messages to travel across multiple machines, through various organizations and networks, and to survive temporary connection outages. The downside to this asynchronous approach is that the sending user or organization has no way of truly knowing if and when the recipient has received the message and whether any post-receipt processing has been successfully accomplished.
This problem is especially prevalent in the case of e-mail archives. Businesses and organizations that are subject to e-mail retention requirements due to regulatory compliance or court order need to be able to search and produce e-mails from such archives. Failure to do so can result in significant fines and reputation damage. Due to the inability for current e-mail systems to guarantee that a message sent to the archive has successfully been saved in the archive, these businesses incur significant cost having to search through redundant backups in addition to their archive.
From the perspective of the message generating e-mail system, there are several potential points of data loss along the way to the archive. For example, the generating e-mail system or an intermediary e-mail system may incur a software or hardware failure, and the message destined to the archive is lost. In addition, the front-end e-mail system of the archive where messages are received or the injection system of the archive where messages are saved into a database may incur a software or hardware failure, and the message destined to the archive is lost. Consequently, improvements are needed to solve these and other problems and for guaranteeing end-to-end delivery and archiving of a message in a transactionless environment.